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Breakout Fiction Writer: Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko's novel The Leavers, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, tells the story of a mother who vanishes and leaves an 11-year-old boy to build a life in the US with an adopted family. Ko’s timely and engrossing work crossed over into public debates around immigration policy in the past year. “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko's novel beautifully written, ambitious and moving,” Ann Patchett has said, “and all of that is true, but it's more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” The book also won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction, a prize awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.

This program is part of the Emerging Writers Series, which is funded in part by Nevada Humanities, Nevada's nonprofit state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.